This
Italian-Renaissance-palazzo-style
club was designed by York & Sawyer, the architects of the
impressive Federal Reserve Bank of New York building in Lower
Manhattan, and is the largest club facility in Manhattan.

The
21-story structure has
300 bedrooms and superb facilities including a 30-by-75-foot swimming
pool on the fourth floor, a large and wonderful billiards room
overlooking Central Park, two handball courts, a gymnasium, and
many meeting rooms.

In
their excellent book,
"New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two
World Wars," Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987,
Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins provide
the following commentary:

"The
athletic facilities
were gathered together in the building's lower floors, so that the
ninth floor was the principal social floor with a lounge and library.
The private dining rooms were on the tenth floor, and the
grand...dining
rooms seating 500 persons in all were on the eleventh floor, where
a large loggia was provided for summertime dining. The location
of the open-air loggia on the west side of the building facing
Seventh Avenue was unexpected, given the opportunity to face Central
Park across Fifty-ninth Street, but the greater extent of Seventh
Avenue frontage permitted a larger outdoor space. while the detailing
of the limestone-clad Renaissance facades was not particularly
elaborate, the building was well massed, culminating in a stubby
tower in which two open and two closed handball courts were located
around a 42-by-62-foot solarium lit through quartz glass windows
that opened to all compass points."

The
club moved into this
structure in 1930. It had formerly been in a building designed
by W. A. Cable at 50 Central Park West, which was demolished for
the St. Moritz Hotel, which was remodeled into the Ritz Carlton
Hotel (see The City Review article).

This
site was formerly occupied
by the so-called "Spanish Flats," designed by Hubert,
Pirsson & Company.

In
her excellent book, "New
York, New York, How The Apartment House Transformed The Life of
The City (1869-1930)," An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company,
New York 1993," Elizabeth Hawes provides the following commentary
about the "Spanish Flats":

"The same year the Chelsea
opened [1883],
the half-completed Central Park Apartments was already being proclaimed
the most elegant apartment house in New York, the largest apartment
house in the world, and the most important building project ever
undertaken, in terms of its novelty, magnitude and cost. Designed
by Hubert and Pirsson but also called the Navarro, or Spanish
Flats, in reference to its building, Josť F. de Navarro,
it occupied a half-block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, from
58th to 59th Street. It stood eight stories tall, towers, gables,
and turrets notwithstanding, and rising above the trees of the
park, it looked like a fortress, or a whole Moorish kingdom. The
Navarro was a single mass divided into eight separate apartment
houses, which were arranged around a central courtyard and connected
internally only on the first floor. Each house had a separate
name and address - Navarro named them the Barcelona, the Salamanca,
the Cordova, the Tolosa, the Grenada, the Valencia, the Madrid,
and the Lisbon, after his favorite places - and each was
distinguishable
by an entrance of triple arches. Inside, each held twelve apartments
of extraordinary dimensions. The largest provided a drawing room
(23 by 29 feet), a reception room (14 by 29), dining room (20
by 23), kitchen (18 by 20) with several roomy pantries, six bedrooms
ranging from 22 by 24 to 14 by 18, three baths with tubs, and
three rooms for servants. It was munificent space, distinctly
more generous than an entire three-story house. There were not
ten houses in New York with such facilities for entertainments
or occasions or ceremony, where public rooms opened onto one another,
like the French nobleman's enfilade, and included a covered balcony
that could be converted into a formal conservatory when necessary.
The general design of the Navarro was even more impressive. Its
suites were not only lavishly decorated but also ingeniously arranged
into simplexes, duplexes, and triplexes (the first in the city),
which were stacked up, in an interlocking scheme similar to Hubert's
mezzanine plan, to occupy two stories in the front of the building
and three in the rear. The taller and grander rooms on the main
floor were set before the park vista, and the kitchen and bedrooms
overlooked the interior courtyard, where there was quiet and an
abundance of light and air. The courtyard of the Navarro was vast,
40 by 300 feet, a luxuriant space filled with trees, flowers and
fountains. To ensure the flow of fresh air there, and to harness
the breezes that swept off the river and down across the park,
Hubert had also incorporated open archways into his building,
perforating
its mass every second story between each of the eight sections
with passageway that was loggia-like, and decorative, as well as
utilitarian. Beneath the courtyard another subterranean courtyard,
accessible by means of a vehicular tunnel leading directly from
the street, allowed carts and wagons to deliver their supplies
and provisions and to remove garbage and ashes in a manner that
was inaudible and invisible to tenants. It was the most original
feature of Hubert's technical design, which also included an apparatus
to create steam heat, a generator for electricity (electricity
was as yet an independent and expensive proposition in the city
and therefore a luxury item in housing), and an artesia well to
supply private water to the building. Ironically the Navarro was
ill fated as a cooperative. As critics were extolling Hubert as
an extraordinary architect of apartments, famous for 'striking
a mean between profusion and parsimony,' the bank was foreclosing
on his mortgage. It took over and completed the project as a complex
of rental buildings, for only half of it was finished and functioning
as a cooperative by 1885. Hubert's 'parsimony' was misplaced in
this venture; his downfall was a scheme by which he had planned
to lease the land, temporarily to the building owners in order
to limit their cash investments, an idea that was untenable in
the face of construction costs that ranked as high as those for
St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Plaza Hotel."

Building's
entrance, looking west

Hubert was only a century or so
too early as
far as real estate markets go.

The NYAC, on the other hand,
supports its palatial
structure with a far larger population: its membership numbers
in the thousands.

View
from the southwest

Clearly the "Spanish Flats"
should
have been preserved, but the city, of course, did not get around
to creating a Landmarks Preservation Commission until 1965, some
four decades too late for the "Spanish Flats." Unlike
some other landmark replacements, the New York Athletic Club has
become an important bulwark of Central Park South and "headstone"
for Seventh Avenue. It is quite handsome, albeit a little stodgy
and its only major drawback is that it is private so the public
cannot enjoy its quite sumptuous interiors and views.

In addition to its enormous and impressive lobby,
the club features a sensational roof deck on the "24th" floor that is
adjoined on its south side by an equally spacious dining room beneath a
very high and very large skylight. The south of this room is
another roof deck that faces 58th Street. The views from the
north roof deck are stupendous and are perhaps the most sensational in
the city as it overlooks all of Central Park, upper Fifth Avenue and
Central Park West and is about the same height as the great
twin-towered peak o Central Park West. The angled skylight of
the adjoining dining room harkens back to the fabulous waiting room of
the demolished Penn Station. While the dining room itself is
relatively modest, especially in comparison with the rooftop dining
facilities at the nearby but much lower Metropolitan Club, the dining
room has windows on three sides. On Thursday nights in warm
weather, the club has a barbecue on this level and the roof deck and
dining room accommodate several hundred contented imbibers and nibblers
and enjoyers of the glories of the city.

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